Optical Character Recognition
Here's your complete guide to machine learning and AI
Although the field of machine learning has only recently reached mainstream notoriety, machines have been taught to learn and make predictions from data for decades. You probably already make use of some of its more established applications like email spam filtering, optical character recognition of scanned documents, and animated dog ears in Snapchat. But the true potential of machine learning has yet to be reached. If you want to make sense of this exciting area of computer science, and help build the future of AI-powered devices and services, the Complete Machine Learning Bundle is an essential overview of its commonly-used technologies and programming techniques. These courses typically cost hundreds of dollars when purchased separately, but you can get the full bundle for just $39 from GDGT Deals.
The Wearables Giving Computer Vision to the Blind
When he was in school, Michael Hingson created a Braille computer terminal so he could study like all the other students. Fresh out of college, he worked on the development of the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the Blind, the first commercial text-to-speech machine for the visually impaired. He's used white canes and guide dogs, voice controls on his smartphone and virtual assistants like Alexa, all in the name of doing things on his own despite being blind since birth. Until recently, that just seemed impossible. So when Hingson talks about the time he assembled a piece of furniture with Ikea-style pictorial directions, it's as if he's scaled a mountain.
Artificial Intelligence vs. Machine Learning: What's the Difference
As the topic says lets us see the difference between artificial intelligence and machine learning, we need to understand first each separately. Let s start with artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence term itself says that it is a kind of intelligence coming from artificial intelligence. So the question arises what intelligence is? Well of human beings intelligence is a capacity to understand and derive complex things much easily. Which is used by humans in day to day life?
From braille to Be My Eyes โ there's a revolution happening in tech for the blind
"Connected to other part," my iPhone says to me as I stand somewhere in London's Soho, trying to decipher the letter on the top of a bus stop. "Hello?" says an American woman, reminding me of Scarlett Johansson's disembodied artificially intelligent character from the sci-fi film Her. "Hey, er โฆ can you give me a hand by reading the letter on the bus stop?" "Sure โฆ can you move your phone a bit more up, and to the left โฆ Ya! I thank her, end the session, pull up Citymapper and navigate my way onto the 453 going to New Cross. I have a little bit of vision, but only enough to see motion and movement. I am using an app called Be My Eyes, an app that connects blind and visually impaired people to sighted volunteers via a remote video connection. Through the phone's camera, the blind person is able to show the sighted individual what they are looking at in the real world, allowing the volunteer to assist them with any of their vision-related problems. I began to lose my sight in the summer of 2013 to a rare genetic mitochondrial disease called Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy and was soon registered blind. I consequently found myself relying on an assortment of assistive technologies to do the simplest of tasks. Be My Eyes has just over 35,000 visually-impaired users registered for the app and over half a million volunteers. Whenever a visually impaired user requests assistance a sighted volunteer receives a notification and a video connection is established. Jose Ranola, a 55-year-old from the Philippines who works in construction and has retinitis pigmentosa, said: "I use it to help me identify medicine and read printed materials and also to describe places and objects." He adds: "All my experiences were good.
Careers at A9
To see what kind of talent we are currently looking for and submit your resume, please visit: https://a9.com/careers/ We are always looking for talented people with backgrounds in: ยท Computer Vision ยท Machine Learning ยท Natural Language Processing ยท Backend Infrastructure / Systems Software Development ยท Analytics Data Mining ยท Pattern Recognition ยท Artificial Intelligence ยท Optical Character Recognition ยท Server Infrastructure ยท Augmented Reality ยท DevOps / Operations Engineer ยท Software Developer in Test A9 solves some of the biggest challenges in search and advertising. We focus on helping people find the things they want. We design, develop, and deploy high performance, fault-tolerant distributed search systems used by millions of Amazon customers every day. Our Search Relevance team works to maximize the quality and effectiveness of the search experience for visitors to Amazon websites worldwide.
How blockchain can improve the mortgage process
Global banks that have a large mortgage business are facing pressure internally and externally to upgrade their operating model to save money, decrease processing times and enhance the customer experience โ today it can take more than 60 days to complete a mortgage transaction. The pressure is particularly strong with FinTechs like US online lender Rocket Mortgage and UK digital mortgage broker Trussle creating a completely digital experience for prospective home buyers. Banks, therefore, are exploring everything from mature technologies like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to more leading edge and high-tech solutions based on blockchain and artificial intelligence. While some of these solutions could dramatically impact day-to-day business for lenders and their brokers and customers, blockchain has the potential to completely transform the entire mortgage financing industry. The financial services industry is all about trust โ whether relationship based, reputational, authoritative (legal) or transactional โ banking today is built on trust.
Azure-Readiness/hol-azure-machine-learning
This content is designed for audience without any prior Machine learning knowledge. It starts from very basics and goes to advanced topics. We will try to keep this content live and include more and more advanced lab sessions with real life scenarious. Thanks for your support and feedback to make this content better.
Baidu's text-to-speech system mimics a variety of accents 'perfectly'
Chinese tech giant Baidu's text-to-speech system, Deep Voice, is making a lot of progress toward sounding more human. The latest news about the tech are audio samples showcasing its ability to accurately portray differences in regional accents. The company says that the new version, aptly named Deep Voice 2, has been able to "learn from hundreds of unique voices from less than a half an hour of data per speaker, while achieving high audio quality." That's compared to the 20 hours hours of training it took to get similar results from the previous iteration, for a single voice, further pushing its efficiency past Google's WaveNet in a few months time. Baidu says that unlike previous text-to-speech systems, Deep Voice 2 finds shared qualities between the training voices entirely on its own, and without any previous guidance.
[R] Deep Voice 2: Multi-Speaker Neural Text-to-Speech โข r/MachineLearning
TL;DR Baidu's TTS system now supports multi-speaker conditioning, and can learn new speakers with very little data (a la LyreBird). I'm really excited about the recent influx of neural-net TTS systems, but all of the them seem to be too slow for real time dialog, or not publicly available, or both. Hoping that one of them gets a high quality open-source implementation soon!
Baidu's Deep Voice 2 text-to-speech engine can imitate hundreds of human accents
Next time you hear a voice generated by Baidu's Deep Voice 2, you might not be able to tell whether it's human. Baidu, the Beijing-based juggernaut that commands 80 percent of the Chinese internet search market, is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. In 2013, it opened the Institute of Deep Learning, an R&D center focused on machine learning. And in May, it took the wraps off the newest version of Deep Voice, its AI-powered text-to-speech engine. Deep Voice 2, which follows on the heels of Deep Voice's public debut earlier this year, can produce real-time speech that's nearly indistinguishable from a human voice.